I have had a nasty trained behavior to deal with since I was three years old. My Mother taught me this behavior before I was three, which is one of the things that makes it so hard to get a handle on. In addition it is tied to the startle response so it is really hard to short circuit when it happens. For many years I didn’t even know I was doing it unless the other party involved was observed to flinch at my response. It appeared to my ears as if I were speaking normally when I was actually yelling.

In recent years I have determined that the trigger is similar to Cognitive Dissonance but stems from a response delivered by another that is completely counter to the response expected by my statement or explanation rather than my holding two diametrically opposing ideas. The response clashes with my own expectations in the same fashion that it would if both of the ideas originated within my own head. This dissonance is the trigger for my outburst response.

I have been trying to learn a method or methods for short circuiting this behavior. It has taken a long time to determine the trigger and I can sometimes intervene and dampen the behavior, but it still happens more than I want. Working on it involves paying close attention to what I and others are doing at any given moment and how that is effecting me. I have observed recent examples of this behavior that shed additional light on the mechanisms involved.

Recently my life partner and I were returning home from visiting grandchildren (and their parents) in Asheville. She always drives, as being a passenger makes her car sick. So I’m sitting in the passenger seat trying to scrape the last of the Peanut Butter from the bottom of the jar. To see into the jar and determine where to place the knife tip to retrieve a dollop to put on a cracker I needed to get the sunlight to shine into the bottom of the jar so I could see. So first you find a shaft of light and then you put the jar into the shaft of light and try to align the jar so the light reaches the bottom of the jar and your eyes can also see the bottom of the jar. After going through the contortions of getting both the jar and myself into the correct position the sun would begin to move. So you execute the whole maneuver again, only to arrive late to the correct location and find the sun moving again. Well the sun moves because the driver is following this curving mountain road and the sun will not stay in one place very long. The thoughts going through my head were “Oh! Come On! Stay straight for just one minute!”.

My thoughts were to blame the driver for my frustration, but I immediately realized that the driver was being as responsible as possible by staying on the road. We are taught that the driver is responsible for the actions of the car, and while that is technically true, it is ridiculous to hold the driver responsible for the road. In fact, since driving is a learned (read conditioned) behavior the drivers actual responsibilities are greatly moderated. I realized that the whole idea of “responsibility” is a bogus idea taught to us to “make us behave properly”…”You have a responsibility to your country”…etc.

Not twenty minutes later in the trip, I was getting set up to take some pictures of an area we go through every time we travel and I never seem to get my phone out fast enough to take the shot. Well, I was all prepared and ready to take the shot when the car when over a series of patches and bumps that almost jarred the camera out of my hands. I yelled my partner’s name in response and immediately realized I had done it again. I immediately told her I recognized the outburst and we talked about it a bit. I realized that most people would has squeaked, shouted, or otherwise exclaimed at such an event, but I was taught to blame a responsible party. My Mother not only needed to find someone to blame for everything that happened around her, she also behaved as though those actions were directed at her personally. At this point in my life, I understand that she came to this point of view in her life as a result of growing up with three brothers who gave her a hard time the entire time they were growing up, so it is no wonder she thought everything was specifically directed at her. I, for some reason, never took on the personal arrow in my perceptions, but I did learn the idea of responsibility. In the recent car incident that learning (again read conditioning here) identified my partner as the culprit and supplied her name to my mouth for the expletive. In just the same way that a jet crashing the sound barrier over you house will get you standing out of your chair before your rational mind can decide that it isn’t a crisis and ignore the flight or fight response. This behavior of mine is tied not only to that flight or fight response that resides in our lizard brain, but also the the responsibility conditioning in such a way that makes the behavior that much more objectionable.

As I have gotten older the times when my mouth says a word that my mind had not directed it to use have been on the increase. I have always thought this was a simple miss step in word choice by the filters that govern your speech, but I’m begging to think it may be more complex than that.

For me these two examples of my own conditioned behavior provide some insight into how to determine if the concepts we have been taught are valid or bogus. I had already decided that the Patriotism concept was only useful to the State and detrimental to the individual. This example provides similar insights into the concept of Responsibility.

In a previous article Ninety-Nine and Forty Four One Hundredths Percent I concluded that most of our behaviors are conditioned/learned. If that is so, then as individuals we bear very little responsibility for our actions. The responsibility resides in the conditioning agency, which is, for many of our behaviors, the State and society as a whole. We can blame our parents for much of it, but they are just as blameless as we are, as all they learned and tried to teach us was taught to them thru a chain into the past that ultimately comes from group directives not individual ones. We are programmed by the world we live in. This is both our strength and our weakness. We must continue to not just learn but understand that learning to the point we can control it.

My search for understanding and control continues.